


hope is a fragile thing, don't hold on too tight or you'll break it

by sirladyknight



Category: The X-Files
Genre: AU Samantha Lives, Accidentally Sad, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Denial of Canon, Gen, Plot Divergences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-24 22:50:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3787294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirladyknight/pseuds/sirladyknight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Samantha lives but her memory is gone. Even so, she lives a semi-normal life and grows up to be an FBI agent. When she sees Mulder in a hallway everything inside her screams in rememberance but her mind is blank.</p><p>AU where Samantha lives because she deserves more than what she was given.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hope is a fragile thing, don't hold on too tight or you'll break it

Sam had never really felt close to anyone in particular, but that was a common mindset most foster children developed by an early age. Being tossed from one household to the next, each welcoming at first and then courteous but cold by the end, doesn’t give a kid the greatest impression of family. What kind of family just gives up on someone? Not one she wanted to be a part of.

So, Sam didn’t have family. To be honest, she couldn’t even remember anything earlier than turning up at a foster home facility with nothing in her pockets but some sunflower seeds and wearing oversized clothes that had probably come from a Goodwill store. She hardly had friends, a few scattered acquaintances that weren’t too bothered by her quirky, somewhat blunt habits and ways of speech. They came and went as well, but she didn’t harbor any ill will towards them, she understood what it was like to not feel a connection with someone. She enjoyed their company while they were around and let them move on when the time came. It was best to keep things simple and easy, no stressful relationships to tangle things up.

She would blame her lack of roots, no real family to speak of, no parental figures that stuck out in her mind, but she had always believed that a person was the guide of their own actions. Just because you drew the short straw in the game of life doesn’t mean you just throw in the towel. If she had given into self-pity, she’d still be stuck in a home with six other kids scrabbling for anything they could call their own.

School had been easy for the most part; it doesn’t take much to focus on your studies when you don’t really have anything else to do or anywhere to really go. A perk of the foster system if you chose to make use of it, one of the very, very few perks she supposed.

Switching schools constantly hadn’t been fun, but she never made a splash anywhere she went and people left her well enough alone when they realized she was the quiet type. If you were boring, people tended to ignore you and she liked that, so she was boring.

She wasn’t exactly a pushover either, her fair share of bruised knuckles and busted lips from standing up to obnoxious tormenters who didn’t like silence as an answer proved that. Sam had dealt with too much to be run down by a common schoolyard bully and she sure wasn’t going to let some kid who had no idea what it was like to be truly helpless push her around.

Maybe it was an overdeveloped sense of justice, grown from the well-meaning but careless adults she had controlling her all her childhood, but she didn’t like the bad guys. She didn’t like villains on TV, she didn’t like dirty politicians, she didn’t like power abusing cops, and she just didn’t like it when the wicked won and the criminal got away.

In that respect, it shouldn’t have been surprising when she eventually got pulled into the law enforcement side of the job market. She was smart, clever and quick on her feet, you had to be to survive where she came from and it paid off in the long run. She was one of the youngest FBI agents to be accepted into the Bureau after she graduated college. It hadn’t been a great college, but her grades had been damn perfect and she had gotten enough scholarships to crawl her way through with no real support from anyone else.

Before finding the Bureau, she had toyed with the possibility of just being a cop, but it had not suited her. She didn’t want to walk a beat; she wanted to solve crimes, to give some sense of peace to those who deserved it. That was more than anything she had ever gotten.

No family, no friends, and not even a history, yet here she was running around trying to save the world one case at a time. She almost made herself laugh, wishing she had this kind of heroism aimed at her when she was younger. In the quiet times between cases, she would spend afternoons dreaming that she had had someone in her life who cared as much as she did for complete strangers. Then again, everyone was a complete stranger to her.

Except him. She _knew_ him.

The man she saw walking down a hallway one day and nearly ran into a wall because she couldn’t stop staring. Everything about him was so familiar, even though she couldn’t recognize him to save her life or even pinpoint an exact feature that she could identify as something she knew from before.

He didn’t notice her. He was too far away and too focused on the folder in his hand and his partner by his side. His hands waved in the air animatedly as his redheaded companion visibly fought not to roll her eyes. They walked past her, only a few yards away, but there could have been miles in between them for all it mattered. For some reason that really hurt her, a kind of betrayal she had never felt before, because she hadn’t  _known_ anyone before. But this man, who she couldn't even recognize save for the feeling in her gut, who wasn’t even from her department, or probably even this district, was the closest thing to a relationship she had.

She didn’t want to say family. She didn’t have any family and that was fine. She was used to it.

Still, her body screamed in recognition as her mind tried furiously to filter through her memories, searching for his face, his brown eyes, his funny nose, and crooked smile, anything that was a part of him that she could distinguish as her own.

If she knew him, why couldn’t she remember? If he was someone that had been close to her, she would know because there hadn’t been many. She had been very alone.

“Who are you?” Sam asked, forgetting the form urgently needing to be faxed in her hand. Her eyes followed him with the single minded intentness that had gotten her in college, then into the FBI, but this, this was different.  

The question fell flat in the noisy room, cubicles and glass doors separating her from him as he stepped into an elevator. He hadn’t broken eye contact with his partner the whole time. He didn’t seem to need anyone but her, even as she lifted an eyebrow in rebuke, no doubt making a witty remark. He laughed.

The elevator doors slide closed and she remembered to breathe, even as something inside her broke and wept.


End file.
